GNU Common Lisp - News: 2.6.2 is released

2.6.2 is released

Item posted by Camm Maguire <camm> on Thu 08 Jul 2004 06:45:19 PM UTC.

This is a significant upgrade from 2.5.3 in many respects.  Please read the release notes at
http://www.gnu.org/software/gcl/RELEASE-2.6.2.html
and the errata page at
http://www.gnu.org/software/gcl/ERRATA-2.6.2.html.

A few highlights:

    *  The development of a 'lisp compiler torture tester' by GCL developer Paul Dietz which repeatedly compiles randomly generated forms of specifiable length to test the compiler for correctness.
    * The application of several significant corrections to the GCL lisp compiler to remove every known instance of miscompilation uncovered by this tester.  To our knowledge, GCL is alone with CLISP in passing this torture test for runs of effectively indefinite length.
    * Major performance improvements were applied to the lisp compiler to enable it to complete random tests of great length in a reasonable amount of time.
    * Corrections to the GCL core files to enable very large image sizes in 64 bits, in which more than a billion cons cells can be allocated.  Current 64bit options include amd64, ia64, and alpha running most flavors of GNU/Linux.
    * Corrections to the heap scaling behavior of the garbage collector, resulting in significant performance gains in many instances.
    * Support for the latest gcc and binutils versions on all platforms but mingw
    * The elimination of many instances of unnecessary internal garbage generation bringing the associated performance gains
    * Native support for execstack protected linux kernels, such as on Fedora core systems
    * Native support for FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and MacOSX
    * Static function pointer support to stabilize dynamic library usage on Itanium systems
    * Transparent readline initialization
    * Support for profiling via gprof
    * Automatic disabling of SGC (stratified garbage collection) if the image is executed on a kernel not supporting fault address recovery
    * Remove a memory leak associated with heavy bignum usage via the introduction of SGC contiguous pages
    * Several significant internal bug fixes, epecially in the mingw port.
    * Alter the build process to perform a full self compile with full function proclamation at build time.
    * GCL now compiles Axiom from scratch and carries it to all supported platforms with the current exception of mingw
    * GCL's ANSI build now in use for its first end-user application -- maxima (current cvs)
    * New 64bit platform support -- amd64, with full native object relocation